Congratulations, graduate! You’ve got the degree. You did the studying and you passed the tests. Now, all you need is a job.

If you didn’t make it over to the Career Services office at your alma mater, you may be confining your post-college job search to just sending out resumes in response to posted job ads. That is a hopeless and discouraging approach, because you’re not likely to hear back from more than two or three percent of the employers you contact that way. The Black Hole, a/k/a the standard, mechanical corporate recruiting portal, is not a friendly and inviting place, and not a lot of people get hired using that channel. Things are slowly changing in the big-company-recruiting landscape, but who has time to wait for that? Here’s a checklist that will help you zero in on where your first-professional-job search is already in great shape and where you might need to put some attention. Read more…

“So, anyway,” says the guy on the phone, “I’m pretty sure my last employer is black-balling me. Every time I get a job interview and it goes well, the thing dies, and it’s always after I submit my list of references.”

“Now, why would your last employer do that?”I asked him. “Did you leave on bad terms?”

“Oh, for sure,” said the fellow on the phone. “I got drunk at lunch and ran a forklift into a brick wall. But I thought they weren’t allowed to give me a bad reference.”

“They can answer the question ‘Is he eligible for rehire?'” I said. “If the answer is No — well, what would you do, if you were a hiring manager?”

“I’d think the worst,” said the guy. “Even worse than the forklift incident.” Read more…

[media-credit id=625 align=”alignleft” width=”214″][/media-credit] In a job search, mojo is the key: the mechanics are easy when your flame is high

It’s kind of depressing to read the typical job-search advice article. Don’t wear this, and don’t say that. You’d think that millions of qualified people are applying for every open job, but that isn’t the case. At least, that isn’t what employers are saying. When I Googled the term “talent shortage” about ten seconds ago, I got 7,460,000 search results back. What does that tell you?

There are tons of people out of work; that is true. But employers are looking for switched-on people who know how to get things done, and sadly we are not trained to present ourselves that way on a job search. It’s just the opposite: we’re trained to bow and scrape and grovel our way through the job search process, as though the only thing that matters to companies desperate for talent is how docile and compliant a job seeker is. (Undoubtedly there are organizations like that, but who the heck would want to work at those places?) Read more…

I worked in a fast-growing high tech company, and it was all fun and games until the CEO said, “Hey, I’m selling the company.” I only got to tell one person, my friend Diane, because Diane and I had to plan the employee communications strategy. “So anyway, Diane,” I told her, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but the company is going to be sold.”

“Well, now I know what my weekend entails,” she said. It was Friday afternoon. “Fetal position, in the bed, with Oreos.” We laughed our heads off, and I don’t think either of us laughed again for three months.

Losing your job is no picnic. Coming back to work after a period of unemployment is hard, too, and so is getting back into the workforce when you’ve been home raising kids or tending to a family member. All of it is hard. We are trained to think about what we don’t have — years of experience, or long lists of certifications, or some other left-brain metric that has zip-all to do with anything on the actual job once you get it. But most of us have drunk a lot of dogma-flavored Kool-Aid over the years. We start to believe that we are lacking, that our job search will be hard, or that we’re going to be stuck forever doing something we don’t like because it’s too hard to do anything else.

When we are in transition, it can be hard to even think about what to do next, much less to act on it. It’s a confusing and frustrating time for most of us. We know that eventually the clouds will part, but when? We don’t know how to proceed. Ironically, it’s in the time of greatest confusion that most of the learning happens, but that doesn’t make being stuck any easier while we’re experiencing it.

My young friend Mikayla is a brilliant chickadee, and she’s been that way as long as I’ve known her. Mikayla is my daughter’s friend, and the two of them are sophomores in college now. Back when the girls were in eleventh grade, Mikayla pitched me on a summer babysitting assignment. “I can just imagine that it’s hard for you once school gets out, with your second-grader underfoot,” she wrote to me. “Do you want me to pick him up at the end of daycamp each day, take him for pizza and a dip in the rec center pool, and bring him back exhausted to have dinner and fall asleep?”

That was a summer babysitting offer I couldn’t refuse. The reason I mention it in this column is because Mikayla put the whole thing together herself; I never mentioned to her that I really like to work until five or five-thirty, or that day camps tend to end at three or three-thirty. I never told her that my workdays were truncated because of the daycamp schedule.

She put herself in my shoes as a hiring manager, if that’s the right term for a person in my situation. The truth is, I hadn’t given three seconds of thought to the idea of summer babysitting before Mikayla wrote to me. If someone had asked me the direct question, “Looking for a summer babysitter?” I would have answered, “Thanks, but no,” because summer babysitting was the last thing on my mind. Mikayla used a critical job-search technique (and consulting business-development technique, and sales technique) that I call Pain-Spotting(TM). She put herself in my shoes. She thought, “What would it be like to be a working mom with a little kid who needs attention after daycamp and has tons of energy, while that same mom has work to do and deadlines to meet?” She saw the pain first, then devised a solution. She presented the pain and her solution to me and created her own summer job. Read more…

“Trifecta,” said my friend Becky on the phone, although she lives in Colorado; if there’s a racetrack around here, it’s news to me.

“Trifecta what?” I asked her.

“I just got home from a job interview where they asked me not one, not two, but all three of the idiotic job interview questions you’re always railing about.”

“All three?” I asked her. “That’s amazing. Were these people otherwise reasonable, or was the place a petri dish full of amoebas?”
“Amoebae, I think,” said Becky. “I think ‘amoebae’ is the plural for ‘amoeba.'”

“Either way, what were these people like?” I pressed her. “Toads,” she said. “I almost didn’t go to the interview at all, because the recruiter who set up the appointment said ‘Don’t be late’ to me before she hung up. I knew then and there that I didn’t want to work with these people, but like you always say, it’s good to go on the interview and get more practice.”

“And grow your mojo,” I added. “Oh, brother!” said Becky. “This was the world’s most slam-dunk mojo-growth interview, let me tell you. As horrible as it was to talk with the toad people, it is nice to remember that I have something valuable to offer, too. It was nice to walk out of there thinking ‘If I live to be a million years old, I’ll never work for people like that.'”

Oh geez, I thought as I answered my office phone, first thing this morning. A PR call at eight a.m.? The young man on the phone was trying to sell me on writing a column about his company’s career-path-calculating software. This was not the call I would have picked to start my day, but the universe is in charge, not me, so I gritted my teeth and stuck with it.

“You know,” I said, “I’m not a fan of instruments and assessments that purport to tell people what they should do for a living.” The young man halted in his pitchman’s spiel. “What?” he asked. “Don’t you think an instrument like ours will do a better job of picking a person’s career path than the person will do, himself?”

“I think that may appear to be true,” I said, “only because it is very hard for most of us (perhaps all of us) to get outside ourselves enough to have a clear perspective on our own situations. However, our friends do a great job of telling us what we’re good at and where we shine. When we can take time to listen to our creative right brains and our bodies, listen to our friends and think about where we’re happiest at work, we can pick perfectly wonderful career paths. I don’t trust any algorithm to do that work. That’s about as human a task as we could imagine. Why would we entrust it to an equation?” Read more…

I’m sure the guy is dead now, whoever he was, but I have a major bone to pick with whoever invented resumes. What a horrible idea! Who could expect us to get twenty, thirty or sixty years of awesome life and work experience across in a two-page document? The idea of a resume itself is what my sporty friends would call a non-starter.

On top of the sucktastic two-page resume format, we’ve got other obstacles in our way when we try to get across our power and heft on the job hunt. Most of us have been taught to write our resumes in a style we could only call Corporate Zombiespeak. It’s the worst. We’re taught to describe ourselves as Results-Oriented Professionals and Motivated Self-Starters, whatever the heck those awful terms mean. We’re taught to talk about our Skills and Competencies.Read more…

Cassandra had been looking for a job for three or four months when she chatted with me after a presentation I gave on new-millennium job hunting. “I had the most upsetting experience recently,” she said. “I interviewed for a Marketing job, and I had every qualification listed in the ad. I could tell, though, that I was losing the two interviewers during the interviews. I couldn’t keep their attention.”

“Who were these guys?” I asked her. “They’re two founders who started an agency together,” she said. “I got about fifty minutes with the first one and then maybe thirty-five with the second guy. The conversations were just off, a little. I was trying to talk about my experience, and I couldn’t get them excited about anything.” Inwardly I grimaced.Read more…

I wrote my first Pain letter after reading your article about Pain letters last week. Hurrah! I got a call from the hiring manager the next day. I have an interview set up for next week.

Now I am avid to write a bunch more Pain letters, but I am curious. When the hiring manager called me to set up the interview for next week, I had already sent in a standard cover letter with my resume, weeks ago. I never heard anything back. Why did the hiring manager respond to my Pain letter so quickly, after ignoring my earlier application?

Liz Ryan is a former Fortune 500 HR executive and the CEO of Human Workplace, an online community and consulting firm focused on reinventing work and career education. She is working with the Denver Post to bring the best expert advice on work place issues and tips to improve your career. Note: Liz Ryan was selected for her expertise, but her opinions are solely her own. We are not endorsing or advocating her business.